"It is Joe Mansell's right to take the seat of honour," responded Mrs. Kane bleakly. "And Clement is senior to Jim."

So there was Emily Kane, sitting very upright in her chair at the end of the table, with Joe Mansell, a heavy man with gross features and a hearty laugh, seated on one side of her, and on the other, her great-nephew Clement, the very antithesis of Joe Mansell but equally displeasing to her.

Clement, a thin, desiccated man in the late thirties, with sparse hair rapidly receding from his brow, did not seem to be making much effort to entertain his great-aunt. He sat crumbling his bread and glancing every now and then in the direction of his wife, who was sitting between Joe Mansell and his son-in-law, Clive Pemble, on the opposite side of the table. Miss Allison, separated from Rosemary Kane by Clive Pemble's impressive form, could not see that sulky beauty, but she knew that Rosemary had come to the party in what the family called "one of her moods." She had many moods. On her good days she could brighten the dullest party by the very infection of her own tearing spirits, but her good days were growing farther and farther apart, so that during the past six months, reflected Miss Allison, glancing back in retrospect, it had been more usual to see Rosemary as she was tonight, with her eyes clouded and her full mouth drooping, boredom and discontent in every line of her lovely body.

Clement, who was a partner in the firm of Kane and Mansell, was a man of considerable substance, and, since he was heir to his cousin's private possessions, a man of large expectations also. Miss Allison supposed that Rosemary must have married him for these reasons, for there did not seem to be any other. She was obviously impatient of him, and as careless of showing her impatience as she was of showing her predilection for the society of one Mr. Trevor Dermott. Mrs. Kane, who thought Clement a poor creature, had claimed the prerogative of extreme old age to tell him two days before that if he did not look after his wife better she would run off with "that Dermott." Miss Allison, mentally contrasting Trevor Dermott's handsome face and noble form with Clement's uninspiring mien and manner, could not but feel that so passionate a creature as Rosemary might be pardoned for throwing her cap over the windmill.